Before reality television became a genre unto itself, before dubiously achieved demi-celebrity became an actual career goal for many, and before blowhard media personalities took as their pet lemmings a significant portion of the American electorate, there was Morton Downey, Jr., a foul-mouthed talk show host who, as the anti-Phil Donahue, blew cigarette smoke in guests’ faces and generally ranted and raved in a manner that now seems both like some overblown caricature of populist agitation and the cornerstone for a cable news empire of ever more emphatically delivered deceitful scare-mongering. In the late 1980s, his meteoric rise keyed a heated debate over raunchiness and civility in public discourse. The new documentary Evocateur: The Morton Downey, Jr. Movie, then, chronicles that clamorous time, in an engaging and entertaining fashion that also rather purposefully induces a certain queasiness.
The brainchild of MTV co-founder Bob Pittman, The Morton Downey, Jr. Show, which debuted on New Jersey-based WWOR in the fall of 1987 and went national the following year, was originally envisioned as an updated version of the same sort of confrontational style of television talk peddled in the 1960s by Joe Pyne. The late Downey, though, who grew up with divorced parents and in the shadow of his famed Irish tenor namesake father, would seem to channel his obsession for fame into playing a character whose vices and hubris would first define and then consume him in real life. Downey wasn’t merely an angry populist; his rhetoric was shot through with envy and rage. He would constantly decry the United States’ “low ebb of morality” while often indulging in a bilious, unfocused rage that made him a hip, wild man hero to disaffected teens and un(der)educated and/or bigoted suburban white males.
The show rose like a rocket, notching all the requisite national magazine covers. Presaging the breathlessly obsessive cable news network over-coverage of various sensational trials that would spread out over the next couple decades, Downey turned the lurid Tawana Bradley case — in which an African-American women alleged kidnapping and rape against a number of white attackers, including police officers — into an ongoing soap opera. Then something strange happened, something almost unthinkable in today’s Internet age; Downey’s fame imploded. After a scuffle during a taping at the Apollo Theater, and some other bad publicity (including a weird putative attack on Downey by white skinheads in an airport bathroom), The Morton Downey, Jr. Show was canceled by the summer of 1989.
The brilliance of something like The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s fascinating, from-the-ground-up reconstruction of a similarly divisive public figure, disgraced The 700 Club co-host and religious theme park peddler Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, lies in its laying waste to motivations and views falsely ascribed to its subject. Evocateur lacks this sort of wallop. It readily identifies the daddy issues, but chooses to more or less ignore Downey’s humbled post-syndication career, framing the third act of his life by way of his protracted lung cancer battle and contrition over being such a public face for smoking. Still, if it suffers from the absence of some key figures in Downey’s life (none of his four wives appear, and only one of his four children), the movie is lithe and entertaining, as well as uncanny in summoning up a gassy, unnerving portrait of a man who birthed so much decibeled anger for money. Among the many interview subjects, a group of Downey’s old producers mention his embrace of emotional rather than any intellectual arguments, and also note the ferocity with which he would attack guests. (Even a friend says, “He could’ve been a serial killer.”)
Co-directors Seth Kramer, Daniel Miller and Jeremy Newberger use animated segments, a la The Kid Stays in the Picture, but here to showcase more literally the snarling monstrousness of Downey’s increasingly unhinged behavior. They also include — in what proves one of the film’s more inspired touches — interviews with a cross-section of hardcore fans (mostly teenagers at the time) who vied for live-taping tickets and came to love their roles as what was known as “The Beast.”
These present-day reflections cast a light on the nature of Downey’s vaguely xenophobic appeal, and speak silent volumes about those who pedal such grotesqueries today. “People want what they’re getting, or they’d be getting something else,” says Pat Buchanan at one point, with a touch of amazed admiration. He’s speaking in regards to Downey’s deft touch at playing upon the worst of human instinct and feeling, but Evocateur makes clear that although this particular three-ring circus enjoyed but a brief run, the bigtop hasn’t vacated the country. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Evocateur is also available across VOD platforms; for more information, click here to visit its website. (Magnolia, R, 90 minutes)
Daily Archives: June 26, 2013
LAFF: Code Black
Filmmakers arrive at a life behind the camera in all sorts of manners these days. But perhaps one of the best things about the rapid decline in the cost of production is that it allows relative neophytes who are perhaps experts in other fields the opportunity to shine an interesting and important light on causes and subjects in a manner that even the most dedicated and intellectually curious nonfiction filmmakers might not be able to achieve. Such is the case with Ryan McGarry, a doctor at Los Angeles County Hospital who took his camera to work during the four years of his residency. The resultant cinematic portrait of that time, Code Black — a world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival, where it picked up the Documentary Grand Prize — paints a dire picture of an American health care system on the precipice of outright collapse.
Turning up the knob on cinematic advocacy to 11, Code Black (the title refers to a waiting room full or beyond capacity, which is its state most of the time) is disquieting and affecting in equal measure and, owing to the roots of its production, comes more or less inoculated against spurious claims of a politicized agenda. This isn’t a film made by someone to advance a predetermined point-of-view, it’s made by (and with) the people who actually toil on the health care frontlines, and deal with a shortage of resources that impacts patient care on a daily basis.
Unfolding as it does from 2008 to 2012, McGarry’s film takes a wholly different tack than Peter Nicks’ verité-style The Waiting Room, which basically was constructed to track as a single 24-hour period at an Oakland hospital that served as the primary care facility for over 250,000 citizens. Its net gut-punch effectiveness, though, is the same. McGarry doesn’t shy away from the sometimes gruesome and/or graphic nature of the injuries that he and his colleagues face in the emergency room, and in the face of public hospital patient overflow and county budget cuts, their little victories often seem nominal and/or short-lived — a case of one step forward, one step back. Still, Code Black is a special film laced with both heartbreak and hope. It deserves a wider audience, and open ears. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (C-Booth LLC, unrated, 80 minutes)
A Place at the Table (Blu-ray)
It seems incongruous during a rampant obesity epidemic in the United States, the notion of around 49 million Americans suffering from “food insecurity” — not knowing where either their next meal will come from, or the money to purchase it. But the smart and poignantly argued new documentary A Place at the Table, in assaying governmental farm subsidy policies and other social welfare assistance, casts hunger and obesity as neighbors, not distant and exclusive conditions separated by a yawning chasm. Engorged with feeling, this nonfiction tale leads with its heart, and successfully makes a persuasive case for social investments that offset future “up-stream” societal costs across a wide range of arenas.
Against a backdrop which has seen a 40 percent rise in the cost of fruits and vegetables over the past three decades, versus a 40 percent decrease in the price of processed foods, A Place at the Table puts in its crosshairs agricultural policies (including $250 billion in USDA subsidies since 1995) that underwrite the massive production of in particular corn, wheat, rice, soy and sugar — the basic ingredients in many high-fat, high-sodium processed foods — but not other staple crops, or whole grains. It does this mostly by polite cajoling, though, rather than heated hectoring.
The film’s rhythms sometimes tip toward the sedate, and while co-directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson succeed in finding articulate and compelling interview subjects, they sometimes have trouble picking effective editorial pivot points and sharpening the spear tip of their arguments, making full sense of their case subjects’ situations. Still, with original music by T Bone Burnett and the Civil Wars, A Place at the Table aims to be a movie with more emotional punching power, which isn’t to say that it’s shoddily researched, just sensitive (perhaps a little too much so) to charges of wonky factorial overkill. Not unlike Food, Inc., though, it shines a light on just the dispiriting degree to which so many — and especially so many children — are prisoners of a system in which the vast majority of the scope of their diet lies outside of reasonably expected mechanisms of their own control.
A Place at the Table comes to Blu-ray presented in a 1080p high definition 1.78:1 widescreen transfer, with English SDH and Spanish subtitles, and an English language DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track that more than adequately handles the title’s rather straightforward aural needs. A heartening slate of supplemental features anchors the release. In addition to deleted scenes and extra, excised cast and crew interviews, there’s a nice feature-length audio commentary track with co-directors Silverbush and Jacobson and executive producer Tom Colicchio that spotlights various production challenges. There’s also a behind-the-scenes featurette and the movie’s theatrical trailer. To purchase the Blu-ray via Half, click here. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)